In the 1840s, a potato disease swept Ireland. Within five years, around a million people had starved to death and another million had emigrated.
All the while, food kept leaving the country for British markets. Anger turned on the Union that was supposed to treat Ireland and Britain as equals.
This is the story of the Great Famine, and how it broke the political tie between the two islands.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] I'm Alastair Budge, and this is part two of our three-part series on Ireland: nine centuries of struggle between an island and its powerful neighbour.
[00:00:22] In part one, we followed Ireland from the Norman arrival of 1169 to the Cromwellian settlement of the 1650s: how what began as a temporary military favour became a permanent occupation that stripped the Catholic majority of their land.
[00:00:40] In this episode, we move through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: from a failed rebellion that triggered an Act of Union, through the catastrophic Great Famine, to the brilliant political near-miss of the 1880s.
[00:00:55] And next up, in part three, we follow Ireland through revolution to independence.
[00:01:02] If you haven't listened to part one yet, now is the time to press pause and catch up on that; this episode follows directly on from where we left off.
[00:01:12] OK then, let's get right into it.
[00:01:16] Now, after the Cromwellian conquest of the 1650s, Ireland was a country defined by division.
[00:01:25] Catholic landowners had been stripped of their estates. The land was now overwhelmingly in Protestant hands: either Anglo-Irish families who had been in Ireland for generations, or new settlers who had arrived with Cromwell's army.
[00:01:43] You might be wondering... what exactly was Ireland, politically? Was it a colony? An independent country? Several different countries?
[00:01:54] The answer is "it's complicated".
[00:01:58] Since Henry VIII had declared himself King of Ireland in the 1540s, Ireland had been a separate kingdom, not a colony, not fully independent, but something in between.
[00:02:12] It shared a monarch with England and later with Britain.
[00:02:16] And it had its own parliament, based in Dublin. But that parliament was not representative of most Irish people. Catholics, who made up the vast majority of the population, were largely excluded from it. The people who sat in the Irish Parliament, who wrote Irish laws, and who governed Ireland, they were overwhelmingly Protestant.
[00:02:42] The system served their interests, which were closely tied to those of the English, and later British, state.
[00:02:52] This is the arrangement we need to keep in mind as we move through this episode. Because everything that follows is, in one way or another, a consequence of it.
[00:03:04] The next blow to Catholic Ireland came at the end of the seventeenth century, through a war that was not, in its origin, really about Ireland at all.
[00:03:16] In 1688, the Catholic King James II of England was overthrown in what historians call the Glorious Revolution. His replacement was the Dutch Protestant, William of Orange, who was invited to take the English throne by a group of Protestant nobles. It was, in essence, a religious and political coup.
[00:03:42] James, however, refused to accept his removal.
[00:03:47] He gathered support, and found his most enthusiastic backers in Ireland, where the Catholic majority hoped a Catholic king might restore what they'd lost under Cromwell.
[00:04:01] James came to Ireland with French backing. William followed. The war between them was fought, in large part, on Irish soil.
[00:04:13] The decisive moment came at the Battle of the Boyne in July 1690, a river crossing north of Dublin. William's army faced James's forces and won. James fled to France. And Ireland's Catholics, who had backed the losing side, faced the consequences.
[00:04:35] Now, the Battle of the Boyne has never been forgotten.
[00:04:40] You may have heard of the Orange marches: annual parades held in Northern Ireland, particularly in July, in which men carry banners, beat drums, and walk through city streets often watched by tense crowds.
[00:04:57] These marches are organised by the Orange Order, a Protestant organisation founded in the 1790s, which commemorates William of Orange's victory, a victory of a Protestant army over a Catholic one.
[00:05:14] So when you see footage of those parades, the colour, the noise, and the tension, you are watching a 17th-century argument playing out on 21st-century streets.
[00:05:29] And following William's victory was a comprehensive set of laws designed to keep Catholics firmly at the bottom of Irish society. These are known as the Penal Laws.
[00:05:44] Catholics could not vote. They could not sit in Parliament. They could not hold public office. They could not buy land, or inherit it from Protestants. Catholic schools were formally forbidden.
[00:05:57] Now, the Penal Laws were not enforced uniformly. In practice, the life of an ordinary Catholic farmer went on more or less as before. But the laws defined the legal position of the Catholic majority as second-class subjects in their own country.
[00:06:20] The people who owned the land, governed the country, and made the laws were overwhelmingly Protestant. The people who worked the land, paid the rents, and had no say in how Ireland was run: they were the Catholic majority.
[00:06:37] That was the Ireland of the early eighteenth century. And it is the starting point for everything that follows.
[00:06:45] Now, in 1789, an event on the other side of the English Channel sent a shockwave through Europe.
[00:06:54] The French Revolution swept away the French monarchy, proclaimed the rights of man, and declared that the people, not kings, not inherited privilege, they should be sovereign.
[00:07:07] Perhaps unsurprisingly, given everything you've heard so far, in Ireland, that message found willing ears.
[00:07:17] One man who felt it particularly strongly was a lawyer from Dublin named Theobald Wolfe Tone. Now, Wolfe Tone was a Protestant, but he had a vision of Ireland in which Catholics and Protestants alike would be united as Irish citizens, free from British control.
[00:07:41] He believed that Britain deliberately kept these groups divided, because a divided Ireland was easier to dominate.
[00:07:51] He co-founded the Society of United Irishmen in 1791. And by 1798, the society was planning an armed rebellion, with French military support.
[00:08:07] The rebellion would prove to be a disaster.
[00:08:12] It broke out in pockets across Ireland and was crushed separately in each one. The government's response was brutal.
[00:08:21] In the words of a prominent Anglo-Irish historian, "In the space of a few weeks, 30,000 – peasants armed with pikes and pitchforks, defenceless women and children – were cut down, shot, or blown like chaff as they charged up to the mouth of the cannon."
[00:08:41] Wolfe Tone, the leader, was captured at sea, sentenced to death, and died in prison before his execution, apparently by his own hand. He was thirty-five, and he became the founding martyr of Irish republicanism.
[00:09:00] And if Wolfe Tone had hoped that his death, and the death of his fellow rebels, would not be in vain, and would at least spark a discussion about Irish independence, he would have been much mistaken.
[00:09:15] The British Prime Minister, William Pitt, had long wanted to dissolve the Irish Parliament and bring Ireland fully under direct British rule.
[00:09:27] The Irish Parliament, that Protestant-dominated body in Dublin, had been a source of frustration for the British government for decades. It was unpredictable. It could be used against British interests.
[00:09:42] And the 1798 rebellion gave Pitt the excuse he was looking for. It proved, so he said, that a separate Irish parliament was simply too dangerous.
[00:09:55] So, in 1800, the Act of Union was passed.
[00:10:01] From the first of January 1801, Ireland was no longer a separate kingdom.
[00:10:08] It was formally part of a new entity: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. England and Scotland had united nearly a century earlier, in 1707, to form Great Britain. Now Great Britain and Ireland were being joined together, on paper, as equal partners in one nation.
[00:10:33] In practice, it meant that Ireland's affairs were decided by a parliament in Westminster, London, in which Irish MPs were a permanent minority, and in which Ireland's commercial interests were subordinate to British ones.
[00:10:50] To push this through, though, Pitt had to offer something in return. He privately assured Catholic leaders that the Union would be followed by Catholic Emancipation, meaning that Catholics would finally be allowed to sit in Parliament and hold most public offices.
[00:11:11] King George III, however, refused.
[00:11:15] He believed that allowing Catholics into Parliament would violate the oath he had sworn at his coronation: an oath to defend the Protestant faith. William Pitt resigned in protest.
[00:11:28] And Catholic Emancipation would not come for another twenty-eight years.
[00:11:34] For Ireland, the Union had promised much and delivered very little.
[00:11:41] The man who finally forced the issue was unlike anyone who had come before him.
[00:11:47] Daniel O'Connell was a Catholic lawyer from County Kerry. He was, by any measure, a remarkable figure.
[00:11:55] He had a gift for public speaking, and was compared to the great orators of ancient Rome. And he had a talent for organising ordinary people that was entirely new in Irish politics.
[00:12:10] He had seen what physical force had brought in 1798, mass death and the loss of Ireland's parliament, and he had drawn a firm conclusion: the only way forward was constitutional.
[00:12:25] Organise. Petition. Elect. Legislate.
[00:12:30] From 1823, he led something called the Catholic Association, collecting small weekly subscriptions from ordinary Irish Catholics across the country. The amounts were tiny, a penny or two a week, but the scale was immense. Within a few years, it was the first genuinely mass political movement in Irish history.
[00:12:55] In 1828, O'Connell stood for election in County Clare. He won easily.
[00:13:03] But here was the problem.
[00:13:06] Under laws dating from the late seventeenth century, anyone wishing to sit in Parliament had to swear a series of oaths: oaths that acknowledged the Protestant monarch as the head of the Church, oaths that no Catholic could swear in good conscience.
[00:13:25] So O’Connell’s victory exposed something fundamental: Catholics could be elected, but they were still effectively barred from fully taking part in the political system.
[00:13:39] The British government found itself facing a crisis. The Duke of Wellington — the general who had defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, and who was now serving as Prime Minister — he had no particular sympathy for Irish Catholics.
[00:13:54] But he was a pragmatist.
[00:13:58] What O'Connell's election had demonstrated was that the Catholic population of Ireland was organised, disciplined, and not going to stop. You could refuse to seat O'Connell.
[00:14:11] But you could not keep every future Catholic candidate out of Parliament indefinitely. And if you tried to hold the line by force, you risked open rebellion in Ireland, which, after everything that had already happened, was not a risk Wellington was prepared to take.
[00:14:30] So, in 1829, the law changed. Catholics could now sit in Parliament and hold most public offices. This was Catholic Emancipation.
[00:14:44] O'Connell crossed to Westminster and became the first Catholic MP since the Penal Laws had effectively barred Catholics from holding office, and in Ireland, he became something close to a national hero. He earned the title by which history remembers him: the Liberator.
[00:15:04] But he wanted more.
[00:15:07] From the 1830s onward, he campaigned for the Repeal of the Act of Union: for Ireland to have its own parliament again. He held vast outdoor meetings. At Tara in 1843, the ancient seat of the High Kings, he drew a crowd estimated at three-quarters of a million people.
[00:15:30] The government, which was alarmed by the movement O'Connell was building, decided it had had enough. It banned his next planned meeting, and O'Connell called it off rather than risk violence. He was arrested, tried, and briefly imprisoned. His movement began to fracture.
[00:15:52] The younger, more radical members of the nationalist movement felt he was too cautious, too willing to compromise.
[00:16:01] His health declined, his Repeal campaign lost momentum, and in 1847 he died in Genoa, on his way to Rome.
[00:16:13] And 1847, the year of his death, was the worst single year of a catastrophe that had already been devastating Ireland since 1845: the Great Famine.
[00:16:27] Now, to understand the Great Famine, we first need to understand what life looked like for most Irish people in the early nineteenth century.
[00:16:37] The majority of Ireland's population, which was around eight million by the 1840s, were tenant farmers. They rented small plots of land from landlords, most of whom were Protestant and many of whom lived in England, collecting their rents from a distance without ever setting foot on their own estates.
[00:17:01] These tenant farmers grew grain, raised cattle, and produced butter and pork. But almost all of it was exported, grown on commercial terms for landlords whose income came from the English market. The tenant farmers could not afford to eat what they grew.
[00:17:23] What they could grow for themselves, cheaply, efficiently, and even on a very small plot of land, was a crop not native to Ireland, but to South America: the potato.
[00:17:37] Over the previous century, the potato had transformed Irish agriculture. A single acre, so less than half a hectare, this could feed a large family for a year. And for the rural majority of Ireland, it had become not a supplement to their diet, but the centre of it.
[00:18:00] And not out of preference, but out of necessity.
[00:18:04] And in the autumn of 1845, a fungal disease arrived in Ireland from North America. It attacked potato plants, rotting the crop in the ground and turning the leaves black. Within weeks, a large part of Ireland's potato harvest was destroyed.
[00:18:25] The blight returned in 1846. And again in 1847.
[00:18:31] People starved. Families were found dead in their cottages. People were reduced to eating grass, boiled nettles, gnawing on bark, doing anything they could to survive. Hundreds of thousands did not, dead by starvation or the multiple diseases that followed.
[00:18:53] And throughout the worst years of the Famine, food continued to leave Ireland.
[00:19:00] Grain, cattle, butter, pork: all exported to England, because the commercial contracts that governed them did not stop because people were dying. Armed guards escorted food shipments to the ports as starving people watched from the roadsides.
[00:19:19] That image lodged in the Irish memory. And for many, it has never quite left.
[00:19:27] The British government's response is one of the most debated questions in Irish history.
[00:19:34] Some measures were taken: maize was bought and distributed to Ireland; public works schemes were set up to give people wages to buy food.
[00:19:44] But the dominant economic thinking of the time held that governments should not intervene in markets: that trade should be left alone, that private charity rather than the state should address suffering.
[00:20:00] And so the response was too slow and too small.
[00:20:05] And some officials had more radical views towards it all. One Treasury official who oversaw the relief operation wrote that the Famine was a judgement of God, and that it was not for man to interfere with God's purposes.
[00:20:23] Public works were wound down just as conditions reached their worst. Soup kitchens were opened too late and closed too early. Landlords were made responsible for providing poor relief, which gave them every incentive to evict starving tenants rather than support them.
[00:20:44] By the time the Famine ended, around 1852, an estimated one million people had died of starvation and disease. More than two million had emigrated — on ships so overcrowded and unsanitary that they became known as coffin ships. Thousands more died on the crossing.
[00:21:09] Ireland's population fell from around eight and a half million in 1845 to six and a half million by 1851. By 1901, it was barely four and a half million. Emigration, which the Famine had turned from a trickle into a flood, did not stop when the blight ended.
[00:21:32] And it continued for generations.
[00:21:36] Those who left carried Ireland with them. They built communities in New York, Boston, Chicago, Melbourne, and Liverpool. They kept their identity, remembered where they came from, and passed the story of the Famine down through their families. The great-grandchildren of Famine emigrants would go on to become senators, mayors, generals — and in 1960, one of them with the Irish surname "Kennedy" would become President of the United States.
[00:22:13] And the anger the Famine created was not simply anger at nature, or at bad luck. It was anger at the system: at landlords collecting rents from people who were dying; at a government that allowed food to leave the country while its people starved; at a union that had promised to bring Ireland into the family of the United Kingdom, and had instead presided over the worst humanitarian catastrophe in nineteenth-century Europe.
[00:22:46] The Famine did not create Irish nationalism.
[00:22:50] But it gave it a fury and a depth that would never quite go away.
[00:22:56] And it was out of this fury, and out of the Irish communities now scattered across America and beyond, that a new kind of organisation emerged.
[00:23:08] In 1858, the Irish Republican Brotherhood was founded, simultaneously in Dublin and New York. In America, it became known as the Fenians, a name taken from the Fianna, the legendary warrior band of ancient Irish myth.
[00:23:27] Their position was stark: constitutional politics had failed. The British Parliament would never willingly give Ireland independence. Only force would work.
[00:23:42] The Fenian Rising of 1867 was the test of that conviction. It was poorly coordinated, as the British government had informers inside the movement, and it was put down quickly.
[00:23:57] But the organisation survived. It went underground, recruited carefully, and waited. Within the broader nationalist movement, it kept alive the conviction that when the right moment came, it would have to be seized, not asked for.
[00:24:15] But not everyone had given up on Parliament.
[00:24:20] If there was a man who could prove that conviction wrong — who could win Irish self-government through constitutional means alone — it was Charles Stewart Parnell.
[00:24:31] Parnell came from a Protestant landowning family in County Wicklow, a county on Ireland's east coast just south of Dublin. He was not the obvious leader of an Irish Catholic nationalist movement: he was reserved, aristocratic, not particularly warm.
[00:24:51] But he was ice-cold under pressure, and he became the most formidable Irish parliamentary operator Britain had ever faced.
[00:25:02] His first campaign was for land reform. Ireland's land system was still, in its essentials, the one the plantations had created: Protestant landlords, Catholic tenants, rents set at whatever the landlord chose, with no legal protection for tenants who could not pay. In the late 1870s, a combination of agricultural depression and bad harvests pushed tenant farmers toward ruin.
[00:25:35] Parnell's Land League organised resistance. And one of its tactics produced a word now used in almost every language in the world.
[00:25:47] Captain Charles Boycott was an English land agent in County Mayo; land agents were the people who managed estates on behalf of landlords, collecting rents and enforcing evictions.
[00:26:02] When Boycott tried to evict tenants, the local community refused to deal with him in any way. No one would harvest his crops, serve in his house, sell him goods, or speak to him. He became so isolated that he eventually had to import workers under military escort just to bring in his harvest, at a cost far greater than the harvest was worth.
[00:26:31] His surname became a verb. To boycott someone: to refuse to deal with them as a form of social and economic pressure.
[00:26:43] Land reform eventually came through legislation. But Parnell's larger goal was Home Rule: an Irish parliament for domestic affairs, while Ireland remained within the United Kingdom.
[00:26:58] And it is worth being clear about what that actually meant, because it was not the same as what Ireland had lost in 1800. The old Irish Parliament, abolished by Pitt, had been almost entirely Protestant. Catholics could not sit in it. It represented the landlord class, not the Irish people.
[00:27:22] Home Rule would be different. A new parliament, representing all of Ireland's people, Catholic and Protestant alike, handling domestic matters: taxation, education and land policy. Westminster would keep control of defence and foreign affairs. It was not full independence. But for the Catholic majority, who had never had a parliament that spoke for them, it was something genuinely new.
[00:27:52] And by the 1880s, the pressure for it had become impossible to ignore. Parnell had turned Irish nationalism into a powerful parliamentary force at Westminster, and the Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone had come to believe that the Union was not working.
[00:28:13] His answer was Home Rule: limited self-government for Ireland, while keeping it inside the United Kingdom.
[00:28:21] So in 1886, Gladstone introduced a Home Rule Bill. It was defeated in the House of Commons.
[00:28:30] Then Parnell's personal life destroyed his political career. His downfall came in 1890, when a divorce case revealed that he had been having an affair with the wife of one of his own MPs, an affair that had been going on for a decade. The Catholic Church turned against him. Gladstone withdrew his party's support. The Irish Parliamentary Party split.
[00:28:58] Parnell fought on, but he was exhausted and ill, and died shortly after, aged only forty-five.
[00:29:07] He did not live to see what followed. A second Home Rule Bill was passed by the Commons in 1893, only to be vetoed by the House of Lords. A third finally became law in 1914, only to be immediately suspended when the First World War broke out.
[00:29:26] So let us take stock.
[00:29:29] If part one was about how England gained control of Ireland — five centuries of conquest, plantation, and dispossession — then this episode has been about what happened when Ireland tried to push back.
[00:29:44] Across two centuries, we have seen: a failed rebellion that handed Britain the justification to abolish Ireland's own parliament; a broken promise of political rights; a catastrophe that killed one million people and sent two million more into exile; an underground movement that concluded Parliament was useless; a brilliant political operator who came closer than anyone before him to winning Home Rule, brought down not by Britain but by a scandal; and a Home Rule Act that finally passed in 1914, only to be shelved the moment war broke out.
[00:30:23] Ireland was exhausted. But it was not finished.
[00:30:27] In the next episode, we find out what happens when the patience finally runs out.
[00:30:34] OK then, that is it for part two of our Ireland series.
[00:30:38] In the third and final episode, we follow Ireland to independence: through the Easter Rising of 1916, the War of Independence, and the Civil War that followed. You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:30:54] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] I'm Alastair Budge, and this is part two of our three-part series on Ireland: nine centuries of struggle between an island and its powerful neighbour.
[00:00:22] In part one, we followed Ireland from the Norman arrival of 1169 to the Cromwellian settlement of the 1650s: how what began as a temporary military favour became a permanent occupation that stripped the Catholic majority of their land.
[00:00:40] In this episode, we move through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: from a failed rebellion that triggered an Act of Union, through the catastrophic Great Famine, to the brilliant political near-miss of the 1880s.
[00:00:55] And next up, in part three, we follow Ireland through revolution to independence.
[00:01:02] If you haven't listened to part one yet, now is the time to press pause and catch up on that; this episode follows directly on from where we left off.
[00:01:12] OK then, let's get right into it.
[00:01:16] Now, after the Cromwellian conquest of the 1650s, Ireland was a country defined by division.
[00:01:25] Catholic landowners had been stripped of their estates. The land was now overwhelmingly in Protestant hands: either Anglo-Irish families who had been in Ireland for generations, or new settlers who had arrived with Cromwell's army.
[00:01:43] You might be wondering... what exactly was Ireland, politically? Was it a colony? An independent country? Several different countries?
[00:01:54] The answer is "it's complicated".
[00:01:58] Since Henry VIII had declared himself King of Ireland in the 1540s, Ireland had been a separate kingdom, not a colony, not fully independent, but something in between.
[00:02:12] It shared a monarch with England and later with Britain.
[00:02:16] And it had its own parliament, based in Dublin. But that parliament was not representative of most Irish people. Catholics, who made up the vast majority of the population, were largely excluded from it. The people who sat in the Irish Parliament, who wrote Irish laws, and who governed Ireland, they were overwhelmingly Protestant.
[00:02:42] The system served their interests, which were closely tied to those of the English, and later British, state.
[00:02:52] This is the arrangement we need to keep in mind as we move through this episode. Because everything that follows is, in one way or another, a consequence of it.
[00:03:04] The next blow to Catholic Ireland came at the end of the seventeenth century, through a war that was not, in its origin, really about Ireland at all.
[00:03:16] In 1688, the Catholic King James II of England was overthrown in what historians call the Glorious Revolution. His replacement was the Dutch Protestant, William of Orange, who was invited to take the English throne by a group of Protestant nobles. It was, in essence, a religious and political coup.
[00:03:42] James, however, refused to accept his removal.
[00:03:47] He gathered support, and found his most enthusiastic backers in Ireland, where the Catholic majority hoped a Catholic king might restore what they'd lost under Cromwell.
[00:04:01] James came to Ireland with French backing. William followed. The war between them was fought, in large part, on Irish soil.
[00:04:13] The decisive moment came at the Battle of the Boyne in July 1690, a river crossing north of Dublin. William's army faced James's forces and won. James fled to France. And Ireland's Catholics, who had backed the losing side, faced the consequences.
[00:04:35] Now, the Battle of the Boyne has never been forgotten.
[00:04:40] You may have heard of the Orange marches: annual parades held in Northern Ireland, particularly in July, in which men carry banners, beat drums, and walk through city streets often watched by tense crowds.
[00:04:57] These marches are organised by the Orange Order, a Protestant organisation founded in the 1790s, which commemorates William of Orange's victory, a victory of a Protestant army over a Catholic one.
[00:05:14] So when you see footage of those parades, the colour, the noise, and the tension, you are watching a 17th-century argument playing out on 21st-century streets.
[00:05:29] And following William's victory was a comprehensive set of laws designed to keep Catholics firmly at the bottom of Irish society. These are known as the Penal Laws.
[00:05:44] Catholics could not vote. They could not sit in Parliament. They could not hold public office. They could not buy land, or inherit it from Protestants. Catholic schools were formally forbidden.
[00:05:57] Now, the Penal Laws were not enforced uniformly. In practice, the life of an ordinary Catholic farmer went on more or less as before. But the laws defined the legal position of the Catholic majority as second-class subjects in their own country.
[00:06:20] The people who owned the land, governed the country, and made the laws were overwhelmingly Protestant. The people who worked the land, paid the rents, and had no say in how Ireland was run: they were the Catholic majority.
[00:06:37] That was the Ireland of the early eighteenth century. And it is the starting point for everything that follows.
[00:06:45] Now, in 1789, an event on the other side of the English Channel sent a shockwave through Europe.
[00:06:54] The French Revolution swept away the French monarchy, proclaimed the rights of man, and declared that the people, not kings, not inherited privilege, they should be sovereign.
[00:07:07] Perhaps unsurprisingly, given everything you've heard so far, in Ireland, that message found willing ears.
[00:07:17] One man who felt it particularly strongly was a lawyer from Dublin named Theobald Wolfe Tone. Now, Wolfe Tone was a Protestant, but he had a vision of Ireland in which Catholics and Protestants alike would be united as Irish citizens, free from British control.
[00:07:41] He believed that Britain deliberately kept these groups divided, because a divided Ireland was easier to dominate.
[00:07:51] He co-founded the Society of United Irishmen in 1791. And by 1798, the society was planning an armed rebellion, with French military support.
[00:08:07] The rebellion would prove to be a disaster.
[00:08:12] It broke out in pockets across Ireland and was crushed separately in each one. The government's response was brutal.
[00:08:21] In the words of a prominent Anglo-Irish historian, "In the space of a few weeks, 30,000 – peasants armed with pikes and pitchforks, defenceless women and children – were cut down, shot, or blown like chaff as they charged up to the mouth of the cannon."
[00:08:41] Wolfe Tone, the leader, was captured at sea, sentenced to death, and died in prison before his execution, apparently by his own hand. He was thirty-five, and he became the founding martyr of Irish republicanism.
[00:09:00] And if Wolfe Tone had hoped that his death, and the death of his fellow rebels, would not be in vain, and would at least spark a discussion about Irish independence, he would have been much mistaken.
[00:09:15] The British Prime Minister, William Pitt, had long wanted to dissolve the Irish Parliament and bring Ireland fully under direct British rule.
[00:09:27] The Irish Parliament, that Protestant-dominated body in Dublin, had been a source of frustration for the British government for decades. It was unpredictable. It could be used against British interests.
[00:09:42] And the 1798 rebellion gave Pitt the excuse he was looking for. It proved, so he said, that a separate Irish parliament was simply too dangerous.
[00:09:55] So, in 1800, the Act of Union was passed.
[00:10:01] From the first of January 1801, Ireland was no longer a separate kingdom.
[00:10:08] It was formally part of a new entity: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. England and Scotland had united nearly a century earlier, in 1707, to form Great Britain. Now Great Britain and Ireland were being joined together, on paper, as equal partners in one nation.
[00:10:33] In practice, it meant that Ireland's affairs were decided by a parliament in Westminster, London, in which Irish MPs were a permanent minority, and in which Ireland's commercial interests were subordinate to British ones.
[00:10:50] To push this through, though, Pitt had to offer something in return. He privately assured Catholic leaders that the Union would be followed by Catholic Emancipation, meaning that Catholics would finally be allowed to sit in Parliament and hold most public offices.
[00:11:11] King George III, however, refused.
[00:11:15] He believed that allowing Catholics into Parliament would violate the oath he had sworn at his coronation: an oath to defend the Protestant faith. William Pitt resigned in protest.
[00:11:28] And Catholic Emancipation would not come for another twenty-eight years.
[00:11:34] For Ireland, the Union had promised much and delivered very little.
[00:11:41] The man who finally forced the issue was unlike anyone who had come before him.
[00:11:47] Daniel O'Connell was a Catholic lawyer from County Kerry. He was, by any measure, a remarkable figure.
[00:11:55] He had a gift for public speaking, and was compared to the great orators of ancient Rome. And he had a talent for organising ordinary people that was entirely new in Irish politics.
[00:12:10] He had seen what physical force had brought in 1798, mass death and the loss of Ireland's parliament, and he had drawn a firm conclusion: the only way forward was constitutional.
[00:12:25] Organise. Petition. Elect. Legislate.
[00:12:30] From 1823, he led something called the Catholic Association, collecting small weekly subscriptions from ordinary Irish Catholics across the country. The amounts were tiny, a penny or two a week, but the scale was immense. Within a few years, it was the first genuinely mass political movement in Irish history.
[00:12:55] In 1828, O'Connell stood for election in County Clare. He won easily.
[00:13:03] But here was the problem.
[00:13:06] Under laws dating from the late seventeenth century, anyone wishing to sit in Parliament had to swear a series of oaths: oaths that acknowledged the Protestant monarch as the head of the Church, oaths that no Catholic could swear in good conscience.
[00:13:25] So O’Connell’s victory exposed something fundamental: Catholics could be elected, but they were still effectively barred from fully taking part in the political system.
[00:13:39] The British government found itself facing a crisis. The Duke of Wellington — the general who had defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, and who was now serving as Prime Minister — he had no particular sympathy for Irish Catholics.
[00:13:54] But he was a pragmatist.
[00:13:58] What O'Connell's election had demonstrated was that the Catholic population of Ireland was organised, disciplined, and not going to stop. You could refuse to seat O'Connell.
[00:14:11] But you could not keep every future Catholic candidate out of Parliament indefinitely. And if you tried to hold the line by force, you risked open rebellion in Ireland, which, after everything that had already happened, was not a risk Wellington was prepared to take.
[00:14:30] So, in 1829, the law changed. Catholics could now sit in Parliament and hold most public offices. This was Catholic Emancipation.
[00:14:44] O'Connell crossed to Westminster and became the first Catholic MP since the Penal Laws had effectively barred Catholics from holding office, and in Ireland, he became something close to a national hero. He earned the title by which history remembers him: the Liberator.
[00:15:04] But he wanted more.
[00:15:07] From the 1830s onward, he campaigned for the Repeal of the Act of Union: for Ireland to have its own parliament again. He held vast outdoor meetings. At Tara in 1843, the ancient seat of the High Kings, he drew a crowd estimated at three-quarters of a million people.
[00:15:30] The government, which was alarmed by the movement O'Connell was building, decided it had had enough. It banned his next planned meeting, and O'Connell called it off rather than risk violence. He was arrested, tried, and briefly imprisoned. His movement began to fracture.
[00:15:52] The younger, more radical members of the nationalist movement felt he was too cautious, too willing to compromise.
[00:16:01] His health declined, his Repeal campaign lost momentum, and in 1847 he died in Genoa, on his way to Rome.
[00:16:13] And 1847, the year of his death, was the worst single year of a catastrophe that had already been devastating Ireland since 1845: the Great Famine.
[00:16:27] Now, to understand the Great Famine, we first need to understand what life looked like for most Irish people in the early nineteenth century.
[00:16:37] The majority of Ireland's population, which was around eight million by the 1840s, were tenant farmers. They rented small plots of land from landlords, most of whom were Protestant and many of whom lived in England, collecting their rents from a distance without ever setting foot on their own estates.
[00:17:01] These tenant farmers grew grain, raised cattle, and produced butter and pork. But almost all of it was exported, grown on commercial terms for landlords whose income came from the English market. The tenant farmers could not afford to eat what they grew.
[00:17:23] What they could grow for themselves, cheaply, efficiently, and even on a very small plot of land, was a crop not native to Ireland, but to South America: the potato.
[00:17:37] Over the previous century, the potato had transformed Irish agriculture. A single acre, so less than half a hectare, this could feed a large family for a year. And for the rural majority of Ireland, it had become not a supplement to their diet, but the centre of it.
[00:18:00] And not out of preference, but out of necessity.
[00:18:04] And in the autumn of 1845, a fungal disease arrived in Ireland from North America. It attacked potato plants, rotting the crop in the ground and turning the leaves black. Within weeks, a large part of Ireland's potato harvest was destroyed.
[00:18:25] The blight returned in 1846. And again in 1847.
[00:18:31] People starved. Families were found dead in their cottages. People were reduced to eating grass, boiled nettles, gnawing on bark, doing anything they could to survive. Hundreds of thousands did not, dead by starvation or the multiple diseases that followed.
[00:18:53] And throughout the worst years of the Famine, food continued to leave Ireland.
[00:19:00] Grain, cattle, butter, pork: all exported to England, because the commercial contracts that governed them did not stop because people were dying. Armed guards escorted food shipments to the ports as starving people watched from the roadsides.
[00:19:19] That image lodged in the Irish memory. And for many, it has never quite left.
[00:19:27] The British government's response is one of the most debated questions in Irish history.
[00:19:34] Some measures were taken: maize was bought and distributed to Ireland; public works schemes were set up to give people wages to buy food.
[00:19:44] But the dominant economic thinking of the time held that governments should not intervene in markets: that trade should be left alone, that private charity rather than the state should address suffering.
[00:20:00] And so the response was too slow and too small.
[00:20:05] And some officials had more radical views towards it all. One Treasury official who oversaw the relief operation wrote that the Famine was a judgement of God, and that it was not for man to interfere with God's purposes.
[00:20:23] Public works were wound down just as conditions reached their worst. Soup kitchens were opened too late and closed too early. Landlords were made responsible for providing poor relief, which gave them every incentive to evict starving tenants rather than support them.
[00:20:44] By the time the Famine ended, around 1852, an estimated one million people had died of starvation and disease. More than two million had emigrated — on ships so overcrowded and unsanitary that they became known as coffin ships. Thousands more died on the crossing.
[00:21:09] Ireland's population fell from around eight and a half million in 1845 to six and a half million by 1851. By 1901, it was barely four and a half million. Emigration, which the Famine had turned from a trickle into a flood, did not stop when the blight ended.
[00:21:32] And it continued for generations.
[00:21:36] Those who left carried Ireland with them. They built communities in New York, Boston, Chicago, Melbourne, and Liverpool. They kept their identity, remembered where they came from, and passed the story of the Famine down through their families. The great-grandchildren of Famine emigrants would go on to become senators, mayors, generals — and in 1960, one of them with the Irish surname "Kennedy" would become President of the United States.
[00:22:13] And the anger the Famine created was not simply anger at nature, or at bad luck. It was anger at the system: at landlords collecting rents from people who were dying; at a government that allowed food to leave the country while its people starved; at a union that had promised to bring Ireland into the family of the United Kingdom, and had instead presided over the worst humanitarian catastrophe in nineteenth-century Europe.
[00:22:46] The Famine did not create Irish nationalism.
[00:22:50] But it gave it a fury and a depth that would never quite go away.
[00:22:56] And it was out of this fury, and out of the Irish communities now scattered across America and beyond, that a new kind of organisation emerged.
[00:23:08] In 1858, the Irish Republican Brotherhood was founded, simultaneously in Dublin and New York. In America, it became known as the Fenians, a name taken from the Fianna, the legendary warrior band of ancient Irish myth.
[00:23:27] Their position was stark: constitutional politics had failed. The British Parliament would never willingly give Ireland independence. Only force would work.
[00:23:42] The Fenian Rising of 1867 was the test of that conviction. It was poorly coordinated, as the British government had informers inside the movement, and it was put down quickly.
[00:23:57] But the organisation survived. It went underground, recruited carefully, and waited. Within the broader nationalist movement, it kept alive the conviction that when the right moment came, it would have to be seized, not asked for.
[00:24:15] But not everyone had given up on Parliament.
[00:24:20] If there was a man who could prove that conviction wrong — who could win Irish self-government through constitutional means alone — it was Charles Stewart Parnell.
[00:24:31] Parnell came from a Protestant landowning family in County Wicklow, a county on Ireland's east coast just south of Dublin. He was not the obvious leader of an Irish Catholic nationalist movement: he was reserved, aristocratic, not particularly warm.
[00:24:51] But he was ice-cold under pressure, and he became the most formidable Irish parliamentary operator Britain had ever faced.
[00:25:02] His first campaign was for land reform. Ireland's land system was still, in its essentials, the one the plantations had created: Protestant landlords, Catholic tenants, rents set at whatever the landlord chose, with no legal protection for tenants who could not pay. In the late 1870s, a combination of agricultural depression and bad harvests pushed tenant farmers toward ruin.
[00:25:35] Parnell's Land League organised resistance. And one of its tactics produced a word now used in almost every language in the world.
[00:25:47] Captain Charles Boycott was an English land agent in County Mayo; land agents were the people who managed estates on behalf of landlords, collecting rents and enforcing evictions.
[00:26:02] When Boycott tried to evict tenants, the local community refused to deal with him in any way. No one would harvest his crops, serve in his house, sell him goods, or speak to him. He became so isolated that he eventually had to import workers under military escort just to bring in his harvest, at a cost far greater than the harvest was worth.
[00:26:31] His surname became a verb. To boycott someone: to refuse to deal with them as a form of social and economic pressure.
[00:26:43] Land reform eventually came through legislation. But Parnell's larger goal was Home Rule: an Irish parliament for domestic affairs, while Ireland remained within the United Kingdom.
[00:26:58] And it is worth being clear about what that actually meant, because it was not the same as what Ireland had lost in 1800. The old Irish Parliament, abolished by Pitt, had been almost entirely Protestant. Catholics could not sit in it. It represented the landlord class, not the Irish people.
[00:27:22] Home Rule would be different. A new parliament, representing all of Ireland's people, Catholic and Protestant alike, handling domestic matters: taxation, education and land policy. Westminster would keep control of defence and foreign affairs. It was not full independence. But for the Catholic majority, who had never had a parliament that spoke for them, it was something genuinely new.
[00:27:52] And by the 1880s, the pressure for it had become impossible to ignore. Parnell had turned Irish nationalism into a powerful parliamentary force at Westminster, and the Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone had come to believe that the Union was not working.
[00:28:13] His answer was Home Rule: limited self-government for Ireland, while keeping it inside the United Kingdom.
[00:28:21] So in 1886, Gladstone introduced a Home Rule Bill. It was defeated in the House of Commons.
[00:28:30] Then Parnell's personal life destroyed his political career. His downfall came in 1890, when a divorce case revealed that he had been having an affair with the wife of one of his own MPs, an affair that had been going on for a decade. The Catholic Church turned against him. Gladstone withdrew his party's support. The Irish Parliamentary Party split.
[00:28:58] Parnell fought on, but he was exhausted and ill, and died shortly after, aged only forty-five.
[00:29:07] He did not live to see what followed. A second Home Rule Bill was passed by the Commons in 1893, only to be vetoed by the House of Lords. A third finally became law in 1914, only to be immediately suspended when the First World War broke out.
[00:29:26] So let us take stock.
[00:29:29] If part one was about how England gained control of Ireland — five centuries of conquest, plantation, and dispossession — then this episode has been about what happened when Ireland tried to push back.
[00:29:44] Across two centuries, we have seen: a failed rebellion that handed Britain the justification to abolish Ireland's own parliament; a broken promise of political rights; a catastrophe that killed one million people and sent two million more into exile; an underground movement that concluded Parliament was useless; a brilliant political operator who came closer than anyone before him to winning Home Rule, brought down not by Britain but by a scandal; and a Home Rule Act that finally passed in 1914, only to be shelved the moment war broke out.
[00:30:23] Ireland was exhausted. But it was not finished.
[00:30:27] In the next episode, we find out what happens when the patience finally runs out.
[00:30:34] OK then, that is it for part two of our Ireland series.
[00:30:38] In the third and final episode, we follow Ireland to independence: through the Easter Rising of 1916, the War of Independence, and the Civil War that followed. You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:30:54] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] I'm Alastair Budge, and this is part two of our three-part series on Ireland: nine centuries of struggle between an island and its powerful neighbour.
[00:00:22] In part one, we followed Ireland from the Norman arrival of 1169 to the Cromwellian settlement of the 1650s: how what began as a temporary military favour became a permanent occupation that stripped the Catholic majority of their land.
[00:00:40] In this episode, we move through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: from a failed rebellion that triggered an Act of Union, through the catastrophic Great Famine, to the brilliant political near-miss of the 1880s.
[00:00:55] And next up, in part three, we follow Ireland through revolution to independence.
[00:01:02] If you haven't listened to part one yet, now is the time to press pause and catch up on that; this episode follows directly on from where we left off.
[00:01:12] OK then, let's get right into it.
[00:01:16] Now, after the Cromwellian conquest of the 1650s, Ireland was a country defined by division.
[00:01:25] Catholic landowners had been stripped of their estates. The land was now overwhelmingly in Protestant hands: either Anglo-Irish families who had been in Ireland for generations, or new settlers who had arrived with Cromwell's army.
[00:01:43] You might be wondering... what exactly was Ireland, politically? Was it a colony? An independent country? Several different countries?
[00:01:54] The answer is "it's complicated".
[00:01:58] Since Henry VIII had declared himself King of Ireland in the 1540s, Ireland had been a separate kingdom, not a colony, not fully independent, but something in between.
[00:02:12] It shared a monarch with England and later with Britain.
[00:02:16] And it had its own parliament, based in Dublin. But that parliament was not representative of most Irish people. Catholics, who made up the vast majority of the population, were largely excluded from it. The people who sat in the Irish Parliament, who wrote Irish laws, and who governed Ireland, they were overwhelmingly Protestant.
[00:02:42] The system served their interests, which were closely tied to those of the English, and later British, state.
[00:02:52] This is the arrangement we need to keep in mind as we move through this episode. Because everything that follows is, in one way or another, a consequence of it.
[00:03:04] The next blow to Catholic Ireland came at the end of the seventeenth century, through a war that was not, in its origin, really about Ireland at all.
[00:03:16] In 1688, the Catholic King James II of England was overthrown in what historians call the Glorious Revolution. His replacement was the Dutch Protestant, William of Orange, who was invited to take the English throne by a group of Protestant nobles. It was, in essence, a religious and political coup.
[00:03:42] James, however, refused to accept his removal.
[00:03:47] He gathered support, and found his most enthusiastic backers in Ireland, where the Catholic majority hoped a Catholic king might restore what they'd lost under Cromwell.
[00:04:01] James came to Ireland with French backing. William followed. The war between them was fought, in large part, on Irish soil.
[00:04:13] The decisive moment came at the Battle of the Boyne in July 1690, a river crossing north of Dublin. William's army faced James's forces and won. James fled to France. And Ireland's Catholics, who had backed the losing side, faced the consequences.
[00:04:35] Now, the Battle of the Boyne has never been forgotten.
[00:04:40] You may have heard of the Orange marches: annual parades held in Northern Ireland, particularly in July, in which men carry banners, beat drums, and walk through city streets often watched by tense crowds.
[00:04:57] These marches are organised by the Orange Order, a Protestant organisation founded in the 1790s, which commemorates William of Orange's victory, a victory of a Protestant army over a Catholic one.
[00:05:14] So when you see footage of those parades, the colour, the noise, and the tension, you are watching a 17th-century argument playing out on 21st-century streets.
[00:05:29] And following William's victory was a comprehensive set of laws designed to keep Catholics firmly at the bottom of Irish society. These are known as the Penal Laws.
[00:05:44] Catholics could not vote. They could not sit in Parliament. They could not hold public office. They could not buy land, or inherit it from Protestants. Catholic schools were formally forbidden.
[00:05:57] Now, the Penal Laws were not enforced uniformly. In practice, the life of an ordinary Catholic farmer went on more or less as before. But the laws defined the legal position of the Catholic majority as second-class subjects in their own country.
[00:06:20] The people who owned the land, governed the country, and made the laws were overwhelmingly Protestant. The people who worked the land, paid the rents, and had no say in how Ireland was run: they were the Catholic majority.
[00:06:37] That was the Ireland of the early eighteenth century. And it is the starting point for everything that follows.
[00:06:45] Now, in 1789, an event on the other side of the English Channel sent a shockwave through Europe.
[00:06:54] The French Revolution swept away the French monarchy, proclaimed the rights of man, and declared that the people, not kings, not inherited privilege, they should be sovereign.
[00:07:07] Perhaps unsurprisingly, given everything you've heard so far, in Ireland, that message found willing ears.
[00:07:17] One man who felt it particularly strongly was a lawyer from Dublin named Theobald Wolfe Tone. Now, Wolfe Tone was a Protestant, but he had a vision of Ireland in which Catholics and Protestants alike would be united as Irish citizens, free from British control.
[00:07:41] He believed that Britain deliberately kept these groups divided, because a divided Ireland was easier to dominate.
[00:07:51] He co-founded the Society of United Irishmen in 1791. And by 1798, the society was planning an armed rebellion, with French military support.
[00:08:07] The rebellion would prove to be a disaster.
[00:08:12] It broke out in pockets across Ireland and was crushed separately in each one. The government's response was brutal.
[00:08:21] In the words of a prominent Anglo-Irish historian, "In the space of a few weeks, 30,000 – peasants armed with pikes and pitchforks, defenceless women and children – were cut down, shot, or blown like chaff as they charged up to the mouth of the cannon."
[00:08:41] Wolfe Tone, the leader, was captured at sea, sentenced to death, and died in prison before his execution, apparently by his own hand. He was thirty-five, and he became the founding martyr of Irish republicanism.
[00:09:00] And if Wolfe Tone had hoped that his death, and the death of his fellow rebels, would not be in vain, and would at least spark a discussion about Irish independence, he would have been much mistaken.
[00:09:15] The British Prime Minister, William Pitt, had long wanted to dissolve the Irish Parliament and bring Ireland fully under direct British rule.
[00:09:27] The Irish Parliament, that Protestant-dominated body in Dublin, had been a source of frustration for the British government for decades. It was unpredictable. It could be used against British interests.
[00:09:42] And the 1798 rebellion gave Pitt the excuse he was looking for. It proved, so he said, that a separate Irish parliament was simply too dangerous.
[00:09:55] So, in 1800, the Act of Union was passed.
[00:10:01] From the first of January 1801, Ireland was no longer a separate kingdom.
[00:10:08] It was formally part of a new entity: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. England and Scotland had united nearly a century earlier, in 1707, to form Great Britain. Now Great Britain and Ireland were being joined together, on paper, as equal partners in one nation.
[00:10:33] In practice, it meant that Ireland's affairs were decided by a parliament in Westminster, London, in which Irish MPs were a permanent minority, and in which Ireland's commercial interests were subordinate to British ones.
[00:10:50] To push this through, though, Pitt had to offer something in return. He privately assured Catholic leaders that the Union would be followed by Catholic Emancipation, meaning that Catholics would finally be allowed to sit in Parliament and hold most public offices.
[00:11:11] King George III, however, refused.
[00:11:15] He believed that allowing Catholics into Parliament would violate the oath he had sworn at his coronation: an oath to defend the Protestant faith. William Pitt resigned in protest.
[00:11:28] And Catholic Emancipation would not come for another twenty-eight years.
[00:11:34] For Ireland, the Union had promised much and delivered very little.
[00:11:41] The man who finally forced the issue was unlike anyone who had come before him.
[00:11:47] Daniel O'Connell was a Catholic lawyer from County Kerry. He was, by any measure, a remarkable figure.
[00:11:55] He had a gift for public speaking, and was compared to the great orators of ancient Rome. And he had a talent for organising ordinary people that was entirely new in Irish politics.
[00:12:10] He had seen what physical force had brought in 1798, mass death and the loss of Ireland's parliament, and he had drawn a firm conclusion: the only way forward was constitutional.
[00:12:25] Organise. Petition. Elect. Legislate.
[00:12:30] From 1823, he led something called the Catholic Association, collecting small weekly subscriptions from ordinary Irish Catholics across the country. The amounts were tiny, a penny or two a week, but the scale was immense. Within a few years, it was the first genuinely mass political movement in Irish history.
[00:12:55] In 1828, O'Connell stood for election in County Clare. He won easily.
[00:13:03] But here was the problem.
[00:13:06] Under laws dating from the late seventeenth century, anyone wishing to sit in Parliament had to swear a series of oaths: oaths that acknowledged the Protestant monarch as the head of the Church, oaths that no Catholic could swear in good conscience.
[00:13:25] So O’Connell’s victory exposed something fundamental: Catholics could be elected, but they were still effectively barred from fully taking part in the political system.
[00:13:39] The British government found itself facing a crisis. The Duke of Wellington — the general who had defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, and who was now serving as Prime Minister — he had no particular sympathy for Irish Catholics.
[00:13:54] But he was a pragmatist.
[00:13:58] What O'Connell's election had demonstrated was that the Catholic population of Ireland was organised, disciplined, and not going to stop. You could refuse to seat O'Connell.
[00:14:11] But you could not keep every future Catholic candidate out of Parliament indefinitely. And if you tried to hold the line by force, you risked open rebellion in Ireland, which, after everything that had already happened, was not a risk Wellington was prepared to take.
[00:14:30] So, in 1829, the law changed. Catholics could now sit in Parliament and hold most public offices. This was Catholic Emancipation.
[00:14:44] O'Connell crossed to Westminster and became the first Catholic MP since the Penal Laws had effectively barred Catholics from holding office, and in Ireland, he became something close to a national hero. He earned the title by which history remembers him: the Liberator.
[00:15:04] But he wanted more.
[00:15:07] From the 1830s onward, he campaigned for the Repeal of the Act of Union: for Ireland to have its own parliament again. He held vast outdoor meetings. At Tara in 1843, the ancient seat of the High Kings, he drew a crowd estimated at three-quarters of a million people.
[00:15:30] The government, which was alarmed by the movement O'Connell was building, decided it had had enough. It banned his next planned meeting, and O'Connell called it off rather than risk violence. He was arrested, tried, and briefly imprisoned. His movement began to fracture.
[00:15:52] The younger, more radical members of the nationalist movement felt he was too cautious, too willing to compromise.
[00:16:01] His health declined, his Repeal campaign lost momentum, and in 1847 he died in Genoa, on his way to Rome.
[00:16:13] And 1847, the year of his death, was the worst single year of a catastrophe that had already been devastating Ireland since 1845: the Great Famine.
[00:16:27] Now, to understand the Great Famine, we first need to understand what life looked like for most Irish people in the early nineteenth century.
[00:16:37] The majority of Ireland's population, which was around eight million by the 1840s, were tenant farmers. They rented small plots of land from landlords, most of whom were Protestant and many of whom lived in England, collecting their rents from a distance without ever setting foot on their own estates.
[00:17:01] These tenant farmers grew grain, raised cattle, and produced butter and pork. But almost all of it was exported, grown on commercial terms for landlords whose income came from the English market. The tenant farmers could not afford to eat what they grew.
[00:17:23] What they could grow for themselves, cheaply, efficiently, and even on a very small plot of land, was a crop not native to Ireland, but to South America: the potato.
[00:17:37] Over the previous century, the potato had transformed Irish agriculture. A single acre, so less than half a hectare, this could feed a large family for a year. And for the rural majority of Ireland, it had become not a supplement to their diet, but the centre of it.
[00:18:00] And not out of preference, but out of necessity.
[00:18:04] And in the autumn of 1845, a fungal disease arrived in Ireland from North America. It attacked potato plants, rotting the crop in the ground and turning the leaves black. Within weeks, a large part of Ireland's potato harvest was destroyed.
[00:18:25] The blight returned in 1846. And again in 1847.
[00:18:31] People starved. Families were found dead in their cottages. People were reduced to eating grass, boiled nettles, gnawing on bark, doing anything they could to survive. Hundreds of thousands did not, dead by starvation or the multiple diseases that followed.
[00:18:53] And throughout the worst years of the Famine, food continued to leave Ireland.
[00:19:00] Grain, cattle, butter, pork: all exported to England, because the commercial contracts that governed them did not stop because people were dying. Armed guards escorted food shipments to the ports as starving people watched from the roadsides.
[00:19:19] That image lodged in the Irish memory. And for many, it has never quite left.
[00:19:27] The British government's response is one of the most debated questions in Irish history.
[00:19:34] Some measures were taken: maize was bought and distributed to Ireland; public works schemes were set up to give people wages to buy food.
[00:19:44] But the dominant economic thinking of the time held that governments should not intervene in markets: that trade should be left alone, that private charity rather than the state should address suffering.
[00:20:00] And so the response was too slow and too small.
[00:20:05] And some officials had more radical views towards it all. One Treasury official who oversaw the relief operation wrote that the Famine was a judgement of God, and that it was not for man to interfere with God's purposes.
[00:20:23] Public works were wound down just as conditions reached their worst. Soup kitchens were opened too late and closed too early. Landlords were made responsible for providing poor relief, which gave them every incentive to evict starving tenants rather than support them.
[00:20:44] By the time the Famine ended, around 1852, an estimated one million people had died of starvation and disease. More than two million had emigrated — on ships so overcrowded and unsanitary that they became known as coffin ships. Thousands more died on the crossing.
[00:21:09] Ireland's population fell from around eight and a half million in 1845 to six and a half million by 1851. By 1901, it was barely four and a half million. Emigration, which the Famine had turned from a trickle into a flood, did not stop when the blight ended.
[00:21:32] And it continued for generations.
[00:21:36] Those who left carried Ireland with them. They built communities in New York, Boston, Chicago, Melbourne, and Liverpool. They kept their identity, remembered where they came from, and passed the story of the Famine down through their families. The great-grandchildren of Famine emigrants would go on to become senators, mayors, generals — and in 1960, one of them with the Irish surname "Kennedy" would become President of the United States.
[00:22:13] And the anger the Famine created was not simply anger at nature, or at bad luck. It was anger at the system: at landlords collecting rents from people who were dying; at a government that allowed food to leave the country while its people starved; at a union that had promised to bring Ireland into the family of the United Kingdom, and had instead presided over the worst humanitarian catastrophe in nineteenth-century Europe.
[00:22:46] The Famine did not create Irish nationalism.
[00:22:50] But it gave it a fury and a depth that would never quite go away.
[00:22:56] And it was out of this fury, and out of the Irish communities now scattered across America and beyond, that a new kind of organisation emerged.
[00:23:08] In 1858, the Irish Republican Brotherhood was founded, simultaneously in Dublin and New York. In America, it became known as the Fenians, a name taken from the Fianna, the legendary warrior band of ancient Irish myth.
[00:23:27] Their position was stark: constitutional politics had failed. The British Parliament would never willingly give Ireland independence. Only force would work.
[00:23:42] The Fenian Rising of 1867 was the test of that conviction. It was poorly coordinated, as the British government had informers inside the movement, and it was put down quickly.
[00:23:57] But the organisation survived. It went underground, recruited carefully, and waited. Within the broader nationalist movement, it kept alive the conviction that when the right moment came, it would have to be seized, not asked for.
[00:24:15] But not everyone had given up on Parliament.
[00:24:20] If there was a man who could prove that conviction wrong — who could win Irish self-government through constitutional means alone — it was Charles Stewart Parnell.
[00:24:31] Parnell came from a Protestant landowning family in County Wicklow, a county on Ireland's east coast just south of Dublin. He was not the obvious leader of an Irish Catholic nationalist movement: he was reserved, aristocratic, not particularly warm.
[00:24:51] But he was ice-cold under pressure, and he became the most formidable Irish parliamentary operator Britain had ever faced.
[00:25:02] His first campaign was for land reform. Ireland's land system was still, in its essentials, the one the plantations had created: Protestant landlords, Catholic tenants, rents set at whatever the landlord chose, with no legal protection for tenants who could not pay. In the late 1870s, a combination of agricultural depression and bad harvests pushed tenant farmers toward ruin.
[00:25:35] Parnell's Land League organised resistance. And one of its tactics produced a word now used in almost every language in the world.
[00:25:47] Captain Charles Boycott was an English land agent in County Mayo; land agents were the people who managed estates on behalf of landlords, collecting rents and enforcing evictions.
[00:26:02] When Boycott tried to evict tenants, the local community refused to deal with him in any way. No one would harvest his crops, serve in his house, sell him goods, or speak to him. He became so isolated that he eventually had to import workers under military escort just to bring in his harvest, at a cost far greater than the harvest was worth.
[00:26:31] His surname became a verb. To boycott someone: to refuse to deal with them as a form of social and economic pressure.
[00:26:43] Land reform eventually came through legislation. But Parnell's larger goal was Home Rule: an Irish parliament for domestic affairs, while Ireland remained within the United Kingdom.
[00:26:58] And it is worth being clear about what that actually meant, because it was not the same as what Ireland had lost in 1800. The old Irish Parliament, abolished by Pitt, had been almost entirely Protestant. Catholics could not sit in it. It represented the landlord class, not the Irish people.
[00:27:22] Home Rule would be different. A new parliament, representing all of Ireland's people, Catholic and Protestant alike, handling domestic matters: taxation, education and land policy. Westminster would keep control of defence and foreign affairs. It was not full independence. But for the Catholic majority, who had never had a parliament that spoke for them, it was something genuinely new.
[00:27:52] And by the 1880s, the pressure for it had become impossible to ignore. Parnell had turned Irish nationalism into a powerful parliamentary force at Westminster, and the Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone had come to believe that the Union was not working.
[00:28:13] His answer was Home Rule: limited self-government for Ireland, while keeping it inside the United Kingdom.
[00:28:21] So in 1886, Gladstone introduced a Home Rule Bill. It was defeated in the House of Commons.
[00:28:30] Then Parnell's personal life destroyed his political career. His downfall came in 1890, when a divorce case revealed that he had been having an affair with the wife of one of his own MPs, an affair that had been going on for a decade. The Catholic Church turned against him. Gladstone withdrew his party's support. The Irish Parliamentary Party split.
[00:28:58] Parnell fought on, but he was exhausted and ill, and died shortly after, aged only forty-five.
[00:29:07] He did not live to see what followed. A second Home Rule Bill was passed by the Commons in 1893, only to be vetoed by the House of Lords. A third finally became law in 1914, only to be immediately suspended when the First World War broke out.
[00:29:26] So let us take stock.
[00:29:29] If part one was about how England gained control of Ireland — five centuries of conquest, plantation, and dispossession — then this episode has been about what happened when Ireland tried to push back.
[00:29:44] Across two centuries, we have seen: a failed rebellion that handed Britain the justification to abolish Ireland's own parliament; a broken promise of political rights; a catastrophe that killed one million people and sent two million more into exile; an underground movement that concluded Parliament was useless; a brilliant political operator who came closer than anyone before him to winning Home Rule, brought down not by Britain but by a scandal; and a Home Rule Act that finally passed in 1914, only to be shelved the moment war broke out.
[00:30:23] Ireland was exhausted. But it was not finished.
[00:30:27] In the next episode, we find out what happens when the patience finally runs out.
[00:30:34] OK then, that is it for part two of our Ireland series.
[00:30:38] In the third and final episode, we follow Ireland to independence: through the Easter Rising of 1916, the War of Independence, and the Civil War that followed. You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:30:54] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
